Guest Speaker Reflection

The following is more information about the entities Rod Olson shared about on Sunday during his Table Church Topic: “Protocol of Belonging…”

Land of Dreams 

I started Land of Dreams with Calgary Catholic Immigration Society as the fiscal partner in 2019. It is a  30 acre mulituultural farm on provincial land 6525 84 Street SE. It is built on three pillars - building relationship with our Indigenous community, providing access to land for newcomers with agricultural backgrounds and together repairing a former construction site through regenerative agriculture. 

It has been a labour of love and I am about to launch the 2.0 version that will be offering support for food sovereignty and food security in the City. One of my favourite things is to watch someone grow a plant that is common in their country here - purslane for the Yazidi women and Black Night shade for the Cameroonian communities. You can see "home" flash across their eyes. 

I have created a not for profit to better align the work to food sovereignty - it is called Land of Dreams Urban Farm & Cultural Centre so there is a moving on from CCIS and we are building in a new site as well. If anyone is interested I do have a newsletter that you can join by emailing connect@landofdreams.earth

EnerGaia 

This is a start up created by myself and two other partners (Greg and Jason) both from Calgary. 

We are an environmental infrastructure project that takes Palm Oil mill waste and turns it into valuable products. 

Each mill has mountains of Empty Fruit Bunch waste which can be turned into biochar through pyrolysis - this becomes a soil amendment that can improve the fertility, structure and water holding capacity of the soil. We are looking to ship the stable biochar into the UAE to assist with "greening the desert". 

Each mill also has several ponds of Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) which is produced through steam sterilization of the fruit when it comes in from the field. These ponds (typically 10-12 on each palm oil mill are responsible for 7% of Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane and through our membrane technology we can eliminate that. 

It has been a very educational journey - we are in the midst of a raise so we are always happy to tell the story to anyone that might be interested in diversifying their investments into work that intends to make a big impact.